Before we read again from those
places which have been before us in the former gatherings in
this season, may I say to you that I really have a sense that
the Lord has something to say to us of a very vital
character just now; that we are not here, and I am not here
in ministry just to give so many addresses, or so much teaching
from the Bible, but rather that there shall be a word from the
Lord for this time.

I don't know how you view it, whether you
think about it or not; but if you will allow me to say this for
my own part, that I approach these times with a very serious,
solemn seeking of the Lord that there shall be a word from Him
for the hour. And you will forgive me if I say, that on my own
part in these times I always have to have in mind the thought that
it
may be the last time, the last conference, in which I minister
to you here. And with that thought, I am the more earnest in my
seeking of the Lord that it shall not be just words, but a
message, and a message from Him. And I say this by way of
seeking to draw you to the seriousness of such a time, if it
should be that the Lord wishes to speak to us for the hour. And
my sense is that it is so. Whether those of you who have been
here thus far have been able to discern the essential message in
all that has been said, I want to focus down upon that this
evening, and with the help of the Lord, try to help you to see
what that word is that I believe the Lord wishes us to have just
now.

Having said that, let us read again from the beginning of
the book of Jeremiah's prophecies. The first chapter, verse four:

"Now the word of the Lord came unto
me saying, Before I formed thee I knew thee; and before thou
camest forth I sanctified thee. I have appointed thee a prophet
unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord God, behold, I cannot
speak for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am
a child, for to whomsoever I shall send thee, thou shalt go, and
whatsoever I shall command thee, thou shalt speak. Be not afraid
because of them, for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the
Lord. Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and
the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth.
See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the
kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, and to destroy and to
overthrow; to build and to plant".

And then again, Acts 1:8: "Ye shall receive power when the
Holy Spirit is come upon you. And ye shall be My witnesses both
in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the
uttermost part of the earth".

Now, as I have said, we are this
evening concentrating upon the heart of things. Forgive some
reiteration with a view to so focusing everything. The heart of
the Bible, the heart of Christianity, of the Christian life, the
heart of Christian experience and all God's dealings and God's
ways with us, with His people, is fellowship with Himself unto a
vocation. Fellowship with God vocationally - not fellowship as
something in itself, or
an end in itself, but fellowship unto a vocation in time and in
eternity. If you would keep that in mind continually, all the
time, it would explain everything, because that is the
explanation
of the Bible from beginning to end, and of all that there is there
from man's creation and the creation of the world, to the glorious
consummation. Fellowship - that final, glorious and wonderful
statement, "and His servants shall serve Him, and they shall
see His face". That's vocation in fellowship,
isn't it, if it means anything at all. And you know that that
stands at the end of the Bible as the ages of the ages take the
place of time.

Now I want to be very careful. I am
not concerned to preach, I want to talk and make sure that what
is said is, from my side, explained carefully. And I want you to
come into this with me, and make it your business to try to
understand and grasp what is being presented.

We have taken these verses from the
beginning of Jeremiah's great ministry, great in every
sense,
stretching over some forty-five years, or thereabouts - so full
and so meaningful. And we have seen how it began; how the Lord
laid His hand on him; how the Lord spoke to him, and what the
Lord said to him, and what his great commission was. If you
follow through this lengthy book, you find that all working out
from chapter to chapter, to the end; that beginning, with all
its terms, is working out.

Now Jeremiah is

A Representative Prophet.

You may have your preferences amongst the prophets, and
when you heard me say that I think that Jeremiah is the greatest
of the prophets you might not agree, because you like Isaiah
better, or someone else. Well, that doesn't matter. Jeremiah is
a prophet to the nations through the nation, and is
representative of the prophetic function and ministry. Now, what
I want you to grasp is this: it does not matter one little bit
who the prophets were; it does not matter that there were
prophets who bore these names - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Daniel, Hosea and all the rest. You can dismiss the names, and
if you like, in a sense dismiss the men as men. But
you must keep and lay hold of this: that these men were a
function, a Divine and heavenly function amongst the people
of
God and in this world. And you have got to get hold of the
function, that is, the thing that God was doing through them.
And that is not confined to the Old Testament prophets, the
prophets of Israel.

There are prophets in the New Testament
church; the church of the New Testament takes up the function.
We are not given the names of the prophets, all of them, in the
New Testament church, but we are told that they are there: "And He
gave some apostles, and some prophets..." this ascended Lord, in
the gifts to the church. And inasmuch as
He has not marked them out by name in the New Testament church,
all of them - I suppose Paul was one, and some of the others
who are known to us by name fulfilled that particular ministry.
But
inasmuch as He has not given us the names of the prophets in the
New Testament dispensation, that doesn't matter; that only
bears out what I say. It is the function that matters, not
the
name or the person - it is the function. And the function which
goes a long way back before Isaiah, and Jeremiah and Ezekiel -
Abraham was a prophet and was called a prophet. This thing
started a long way back and it comes right on. The function, what
was it? Related to this one, essential, basic, central thing: the
whole
matter of fellowship with God in vocation. Now you can take
that
to your Bible, and the Bible will prove that that's right.
Fellowship with God - real relationship with God in oneness of
heart, oneness of heart, unto a vocation.

Now, that prophetic ministry, and
the prophets, were related in their ministry, their work, not to
themselves in this matter, not to themselves in this matter, but
to the people that God meant to
have, the race in that position - a people in this earth,
in that
relationship, fulfilling that vocation. They were the prophets
of Israel, but the whole point of their life was that Israel, as
a nation, as a people, should be in that relationship with God,
of fellowship, to a worldwide vocation. That is why God chose
Israel, to put them at the centre of the nations, in order that in
this particular and peculiar relationship with Himself in
fellowship, they might fulfill a Divine vocation amongst the
nations, and to the nations, that if by response to God's
overtures, all men might come into that relationship with
Him - the whole
world. It was open to the whole world to come into that
relationship with God.

Don't make any mistake about it,
dear friends, for our way of speaking often betrays a faultiness
in our conception. We so often hear people in prayer, and other
ways, speaking of the 'redeemed' in the earth; praying for the
'redeemed' in the earth. And the mentality is that the
'redeemed' is synonymous with the 'saved' - it is not. It is not.
Every
child of Adam has been redeemed; every child of Adam has been
redeemed by the Cross of the Lord Jesus; there is not a man,
woman or child on this earth that has not been redeemed. The
great tragedy - the two-fold tragedy is that so few know that
they are redeemed, and that so many who are redeemed will not
accept their redemption. Judgment, you see, will rest upon that
- the refusal to have something so costly, which is theirs by
right. Well, that's by the way.

The Function Issuing from this Fellowship

Is to let the nations know what God has done by the Cross of His
Son for them; and to bring the nations into that
relationship with God, which will mean that the nations serve
Him, serve Him. But come back - this is what is meant by the
prophetic
ministry. Do not think of prophets, or prophetic ministry,
as bound up with a certain cult, a certain class of people. We
speak in Old Testament terms of 'priests' and 'prophets' and
'kings' - oh, what a lot has to be done in our mentality over
this! The church of Jesus Christ is called into the great
prophetic ministry through fellowship with Him. It is a prophet
nation to the nations. If you are in it, you're in that. You
can call yourself a prophet if you like (you'd better not!), but
it is
true if you really are in this vessel. Your function, your
function, your
vocation is far beyond yourself and yourselves; it's to the
uttermost part of the earth in some way. But I am anticipating.
This is the meaning of what is in the Old Testament - the
ministry and work of the prophets - it's a ministry that does
not end with them, is not confined to them; it is a ministry
brought right on. And while there is a need for this particular
function, it will go on, right on to the end.

Now you see that while this was
true, and it is so patently true of those called the prophets in
the Old Testament, this was the real nature, the essence, of the
call of disciples. The very disciples of the New Testament, of
Christ, became disciples on this basis, "And He chose twelve,
that they might be with Him" - that is fellowship, "and
that He might send them forth" - that is vocation. These
two always go together. Discipleship rests on that. Now, you might be
unprepared to call yourself by any of the other names, but I am
quite sure you would be prepared to call yourself a 'disciple'
if you belong to the Lord. At least that is our relationship
with Him - a disciple. But there it is, whatever that means, a
follower, a taught
one, one under instruction - whatever it means - it is just that
basic, initial relationship to Him - a disciple. Now, note
again, discipleship, the very first phase of the Christian
life,
rests upon this fellowship unto vocation. Discipleship was
that.

Apostleship - and again we put a
ring round a certain class, and call them 'the apostles'. Well,
of course, in a sense that's right, but in another sense it's
wrong. Every one of us is a 'sent one'. If you haven't got that
consciousness that you are a 'sent one', then there is something
defective about your Christian life. You may only be 'sent' on a
very short errand, within a very short geographical limit, but
you are there as sent by God. And 'apostle' simply means that:
'sent one'. Sent one. The whole content of apostleship is just
this -
fellowship unto vocation.

And when you leave the individual
aspect, and move to the collective, do remember, dear friends,
do remember, that while the book of the Acts of course includes
necessarily,
individuals, all the individuals, the book of the Acts is
concerned with the church - firstly the church universal, the
whole church. And the church has its very existence upon this
one exclusive and inclusive basis. The church is the apostolic
church, the apostle church in this sense; the whole object of the
church (and it has
none other) is to have a people in fellowship with the Lord to a
worldwide vocation. Well, that is obvious in the book of the
Acts - you see? Fellowship unto vocation - that is the
explanation of the church. And when you break up the church (in
a right way) into churches - the churches - what is the
Divine
idea, mind, about churches? Here and there planted, planted by
heaven, throughout Asia, throughout Europe, anywhere; here or
there, wherever you are come from, what is the Divine idea
of a company, smaller or larger, in any particular location? It's
the same - fellowship with God unto a world vocation!

World Vocation

The
churches exist for that. Do you get a hold of that? The
ministries, Divinely given from
heaven, relate to that one thing. Is it a ministry of
instruction in the companies, unto the persons - a ministry of
instruction? The ministry of instruction is to result, is
intended to result, in this double thing: the fellowship with
the
Lord being right and clear and true and full, unto vocation.
Any
other function in the church or the churches has this same
object in view all the time. The Holy Spirit's presence and
activities is all on this basis, and on this line. All discipline,
all
chastening, all correction, all empowering - everything that the
Holy Spirit will do directly or through instrumentalities, has one
thing in view - the right relationship to the Lord -
can you challenge that? Can you dispute that? The right
relationship with the Lord, with the object of making those so
rightly related, His vehicles and His instruments to a wider
circle than themselves. "He gave some apostles, some prophets,
some evangelists, some pastors and teachers". What for?
What for? The rest of the statement is: "… for the making
complete of the
saints unto the work of the ministry".
Unfortunately the punctuation has spoiled that statement, but it
is a whole. The perfecting, or making complete of the saints unto
the work of the ministry. It is the saints who are to fulfil the
ministry. It is the church that is the anointed vessel of
ministry. If you come into the church you come into that which is
the Divinely chosen from all eternity - "before I formed thee I
knew thee" – chosen from eternity; called in time; endowed
from heaven; you come into that church, and you come into
a place
where these two things are implicit from heaven's standpoint. Fail
there, and you fail of the very meaning of your Christian
life
and of your church relatedness. Fellowship with the Lord.
Fellowship with the Lord, that is
what ought to be in our individual Christian life, and in our life
together as companies of the Lord's people, a basic thing:
fellowship with the
Lord, but not stopping there - unto vocation, unto vocation, world
vocation at
that!

So you see the meaning of this
ministry. So far as the prophets were concerned, and they spoke
sometimes like thunder, sometimes with broken hearts and a sob.
Why? Because they knew, they knew dear friends, what I am this
night
trying to make you know. They knew that if this relationship
with the Lord, this real fellowship with the Lord,
resulting in
this real, worldwide vocation of representing Him
to the nations
- if that broke down, the very, very meaning of their existence
was
gone, and there was nothing for it but for God to put them
aside. When God did set aside any vessel that He had brought in
for that purpose, be it a whole nation, and send it away into
captivity and exile, it was for this thing only - you have
failed in the thing for which you were brought into being:
to
represent Me in the nations, to express Me to the nations. And
you have failed of your vocation because you have lost your
fellowship. That sums up the prophets, doesn't it? Their cry,
their appeals, their warnings, their thunderings and their
broken hearts.

And you can see, at once, if you know Jeremiah,
that he is representative of this particular ministry - you can
see at once how true that was. How he cried, speaking for God:
"My people, my people have committed two evils, They have
forsaken Me, the fountain of water; and have hewn out cisterns" -
broken cisterns, man-made contrivances in the
place of the living God. That was Jeremiah's cry, or one of his
cries. And I am afraid of bringing in too much detail from this
long book, but I could take up thing after thing to show that it
comes back to this: the people are out of touch with God, and
therefore out of touch with a nation, as far as a testimony is
concerned.

Now, dear friends, let's come
right home in all faithfulness, to ourselves, whether here in
this place, or in any other place where you may be with the Lord's
people. If ever the Lord raises up or plants an instrument,
a vessel, in any place, He does it on this alone basis: on the
one side, to bring into the closest, and fullest, and deepest
fellowship with Himself that is possible; and on the other side,
with the world in view, not themselves in view - not
themselves
in view, but the world in view. Believe that, a world testimony
is always God's thought in any selective choice and
appointment of His. And, listen, the essential to the
very
life of such a people is a dominant sense and consciousness of
being in a world ministry. If you forget everything else, hold
that and carry it forward for all time to come.

You must, dear
friends, individually, and you must as companies of the Lord's
people wherever you are, you must, if you are to conform to the
Divine mind in your existence, you must have this dominant
consciousness that you stand related to a great world ministry.
It is over that that the battle will rage. Anything to weaken
that, to dispose of that, to spoil that, break that up,
paralyse that, end that! Don't you see that every time God has
moved in a prophetic way (I mean on this principle of
recovering or securing something according to His mind, in
fulness) every time He has moved, the movement has had a far
horizon; it has had something far beyond itself in view.
In the
days of its livingness, its primal freshness, oh how it
spontaneously moved out to the world, and became a world force.
No organization, no hewn-out cisterns were necessary, no plans,
no programmes to do things in the world, but there the thing
happened! It happened without effort, without propaganda,
without advertising or publicity - it happened! And the world
was touched.

Can we not go through those movements? Yes, we can
mention so many of them; there they are in history - things that
God did from heaven. And the result was a wonderful fellowship
with Himself in Life, a wonderful fellowship with Himself in Life.
I'm afraid to mention any one lest I spoil the picture.
Some of you know, if I were to pick out the wonderful movement
through the Moravian brethren, well, it's so, so clear, evident,
with them. On the one side, it was a beautiful, a wonderful
fellowship with God, wonderful fellowship with God. Their motto,
and everything spoke of that. What a fellowship with God! On the
other side how the world was touched then! Yes, a world
testimony, and a world impact; quite spontaneous...
spontaneous, a repetition
of what we have in the book of the Acts - spontaneous.

And so we
could put our finger upon one thing after another and see this.
And then what? And then, and this is the tragedy - they turned in
on
themselves. Every one of them turned in on itself, became
something in itself, drew a circle round itself, constituted a
hard and fast system of teaching to which you must conform;
regulations that you must observe... turned in on itself - and
what? Disintegration, divisions, confusion, and creeping
paralysis! Isn't that true to history? You see the reverse.
Because that was the state of things, firstly in Israel in the
days of the prophets, that we have these prophetic ministries.
It was because that that was the situation that was growing in the
churches of the New Testament that we have the messages at the
beginning of the book of the Revelation to the seven churches in
Asia - just that! Just that. They are lampstands! They are
lampstands, Jesus Himself said that
no man himself lighteth a lamp and puts it under a bushel; a lamp
is a
testimony for all to see; for the illumination of all within its
range: something not to live unto itself.

This has always been the peril,
always been the battle ground, to maintain this two-fold
position: living, unclouded, unshadowed fellowship with the
Lord and a testimony to the world. Yes, beginning, if you like,
locally, but ever and always far beyond, having that in view.
And it can be put to the test. It is true. So it works.

If the Lord has to chasten,
discipline, and sift all such activities and ministries,
painful as they may be to those concerned, have this still in
view:

Recovery of Fellowship with Himself unto Essential
Vocation.

Now then, have you met that challenge this very
moment? Ask your own heart. Have you dear friends, in your very
constitution
as a Christian, a sense that you do not live unto yourself, and
you cannot live unto yourself, but that you are bound up
with a great purpose, a great Divine purpose, reaching out
and
on, drawing out your life? Are you? If that is not true, you
come into the category of "she that liveth to herself is dead
while she liveth". Isn't that true? It's true! Our life,
very
life, depends upon this, that we are in union with God with a
purpose, with a vocation. And this is no small thing - it draws
us out to the uttermost part; the ends of the earth are our
concern. If the Lord wants us to go, well, we are ready to go.
But whether He calls us to the end of the earth or not, our
hearts reach there with Him for all His interests. And it is not
sentimental; it is something that is a part of our being. A part
of our being. Is that
true of you? Have you just settled right down, nicely settled down
into your nest, whatever that nest is? Well, remember the words
about the Lord stirring up the nest, and casting out! That's
not a very pleasant experience. It will have to be if we settle
down in our nest, if we put a limit that God does not put upon our
calling, our vocation. Well, perhaps I have said enough.

Here were these disciples, in their fellowship with the Lord,
being trained, disciplined, instructed. And it was not all
words where the Master and they were concerned; they had some
bad times, painful experiences, heading right up to the
inclusive, painfulness of the Cross. It was all to prepare the way
for a
new Holy Spirit fellowship with the Lord unto their world
vocation; to be with Him that He might send forth.
I think
perhaps I should stop.

Much more could be said and much more is in
my heart to say, but I do feel that this is the word of the
Lord. And it comes just right to this one thing: You and I, every
one
of us, must be mastered and governed by a great sense of Divine
vocation in our existence; which vocation for its fulfilment of
course, demands
a fellowship with the Lord that is close,
that is pure; because this vocation can never be truly fulfilled
unless it is so. That is why the Lord is disciplining us,
putting us through it so continually, having such short terms
with us on wrongs, evils, questionable things; not letting us
get away with it, run off - no, holding us to it, and working
deeply and thoroughly, and perhaps drastically. His object is
vocation.

If you don't like the word 'vocation' - sounds too
technical - it is testimony. It is spiritual ministry -
which is
not going on to a platform here and there and everywhere with a
Bible, but a life that knows the Lord; a life that is in
fellowship with God. You can leave the preaching side, you can
leave that. Don't you worry about the preaching side, or the
Bible teaching side as some particular and peculiar function -
you need not worry about that. Jeremiah, Jeremiah got to the place
where
he said, "I will never preach again; I will never preach again; I
am not going to do any more of this talking." The preaching took
charge of him; he didn't take charge of the preaching; it came
out of the fire burning in his bones - it has got to be like
that. But... that fire only burns when you are in real touch
with
the Lord - that's where the fire burns.

Well, have I said
enough? Will you be patient and ask for grace to receive this?
And do remember, do remember that most of our enemies, if not
all of them (and there are many, many of them) most of our
enemies have this one object as their target: our fellowship
with
the Lord resulting in our testimony to the Lord. If he can
undermine, undercut that by any means at all, he is going
to do it. And oh, how many are his means!

The Lord help us to
receive the word and to yield to it, and go back with this. It
might
be new commissioning, wherever you go to - go back: "I am not
here just for here, just to live in this small realm; I am not
here with myself and my immediate circumstances as my horizon; I
am here as a part of something far bigger. I am a member
of a
church which was brought into being, a church universal, brought
into being for a world testimony to the Lord, I affect that. I
affect that, consciously or unconsciously, and mostly
unconsciously, I affect that. I touch it. My spiritual life
means something to other people of the Lord."

You don't know,
dear friends, how many of your dark days and bad times are
because, because some brother or sister or brethren and sisters
somewhere are going through it, and you are involved in it. Now
that is New Testament teaching: "If one member suffer, all the
members suffer". How often there has come
to us a sense of some brother or sister, or some of the children
of God having a bad time. It has overcome our spirit, and we
have had to pray for them, we just had to pray for them. And
when we've learned the truth, it was just at that time that they
needed our prayer and were asking the Lord for special help, and
it
was laid on us. You see, in this great spiritual system, time
and geography have no place; we are met in our Head, Christ
Jesus. Now that is another big matter, but it comes in here. We
belong, by our very relationship to Christ, to something that is
far reaching... and the vitals, the very vitals of that far
reaching vocation of the church of which we are part, is our
relationship to the Lord, our fellowship with the Lord. The Lord
keep that pure and strong.